• Movies

by Marron Marvel on 10.03.11

When I was on my way to see Dream House, I jokingly told all of my friends, "The twist is that the kid can see ghosts and Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time." How disappointing, then, it is that this tongue-in-cheek comment was a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts -- and not the cool kinds with fixed points in time with dramatic warnings like, "The Doctor must die." Instead, we are left with an anticlimatic climax and a movie that teeters somewhere between horribly disappointing and horribly mediocre.

Dream House tells the story of book editor Will Atenton (Craig) who decides to leave his upscale Manhattan publishing firm to relocate to suburban New England; he plans to live out the American dream by writing a novel and spending more time with his wife Libby (Weisz) and daughters Trish and Dee Dee. However, their move to suburban life is not all it's cracked up to be. The neighbors are cold and distant, and strange things start happening. After shooing away some neighborhood kids that have broken into the basement, Will Atenton finds out that the house has a grisly past: several murders took place when the previous family's father supposedly murdered his wife and children in cold blood. After some research, Atenton finds that it was a man named David Ward -- and he may be after Atenton's family now that he's been released from the mental instution after five years.

Will Atenton wants answers, and he finds them at the mental hospital where Ward was a patient: as it turns out, Will Atenton is Peter Ward, and he is the one who supposedly murdered his family.

This bit of information, which should have been a big reveal/twist in the movie, was actually given to moviegoers by the theatrical trailer. This travesty of a marketing decision utterly and completely removed all of the thrill and suspense from the movie because, going in, we already knew that Atenton was really Ward and that his family was murdered. In the theater, the teenagers behind us kept snickering and giggling whenever Atenton's wife got upset that the neighbors were unfriendly toward her or unhelpful -- and really, I couldn't be mad at them for being so vocal with their laughter, not when what should have been mysterious and suspensful was turned into a farce because the audience was already in on the secret. I myself leaned over to my boyfriend and whispered, "Is he eating ghost soup?" near the beginning of the film.

The "real" twist to the movie wasn't a twist at all, and was fairly easy to guess from the very beginning seeing as how Atenton's neighbor Ann Patterson (Watts) and her family were really the only other characters involved in the movie.

The saddest part of this entire farce of a suspense/thriller is that it might have been a semi-decent film if we hadn't been let in on the secret beforehand. Weisz is extremely convincing with her concern for the strange happenings going on in their house and her obvious upset when her husband isn't telling her everything. Craig is convincing in his madness as we see his emotional breakdown when he finds out that he is really Peter Ward and comes to accept the truth. Naomi Watts is... Well, she looks good, anyway. I greatly enjoyed the cinematography in this film, with lots of great camera shots of figures in shadow and the changing of the house from Atenton/David's delusion to reality and vice-versa as he went in and out of denial about his family's death. However, and tension that might have been caused by chasing shadowy figures through the dark blankets of snow is lost in the pre-knowledge of Atenton's inevitable discovery of his true identity.

Unfortunately, not even a gratuitous shot of Daniel Craig's abs and all of his great acting skills could save this movie. In the end, it's a mediocre-at-best thriller whose biggest -- and most interesting -- plot twist was given away in the trailer, rendering the entire film predictable and uninteresting.

In the end, I feel as though my post-viewing Facebook status update sums up this movie quite well: Daniel Craig has sexy abs, and he eats ghost soup.